Gmail, other Google services hit by outage on Friday

An apparently broad outage rocked Gmail and a raft of other Google Web applications Friday afternoon, leading many affected users to flood Twitter, other social media sites and discussion forums with complaints.

Google acknowledged the Gmail problem at around 2:10 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on its Apps Status site, and declared it solved at around 3:20 p.m.

The company later reported on the Apps Status at around 3 p.m. that more than 10 other services were also having problems, including Calendar, Talk, Drive, Docs, Sites, Groups, Voice and Google+ Hangouts.

The outages of most of those applications were declared fixed by 3:25 p.m., with the exception of Google+ Hangouts, which was cleared at around 3:50 p.m. The problem with Voice hasn't yet been fixed.

Asked for comment about the cause and scope of the outage, the Google public relations team said via email to check the Apps Status site for information.

"Interesting watching my Twitter feed explode with people frustrated that their Gmail is down. Guess we're still a way from email's demise," wrote Forrester Research analyst TJ Keitt on his Twitter account.

Gmail is used both by individuals for personal communications and by businesses for their employees as part of the Google Apps email and collaboration suite.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch reported the bizarre situation of a man who since last night has been receiving a deluge of emails because of a link that appears when people search for "Gmail" on Google.

Such a search query delivers as its first result -- as expected -- a link for Gmail, but a sub-link that appears below it, labeled "Email" triggers, when clicked upon, a Gmail message interface already addressed to the man's Hotmail account.

It's not clear whether this issue is related to the outages on Friday afternoon, since the man, David Peck, told TechCrunch that the issue started on Thursday evening.

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about that issue, which IDG News Service was able to reproduce.

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